This invention relates to scanning of a physical version (e.g., paper) of a document and more particularly to recording annotations made to a physical version of a document onto an electronic version of the document.
Although individuals are increasingly using electronic documents in place of paper documents, some users still prefer to read and annotate paper documents for a variety of reasons. For example, some users are more comfortable using a paper document instead of an electronic document for editing purposes. Other reasons relate to the numerous advantages of using a paper document. Such advantages include the high-resolution associated with a paper document, the portability of the paper document, the ease of copying the paper document, and the ease of editing or adding annotations to a paper document. Additionally, annotating a paper document does not require a power source which is required to directly annotate an electronic document.
Annotations that are generally made to a paper document include a printed annotation, a written annotation, a colored marking, a sound, and an image. Colored markings include highlights that are applied over the top of a machine-printed text.
Pen scanners are capable of recording marks made to a paper document. Pen scanners are electronic devices used to record the path followed by a pen when a user writes or prints text or images on a paper document. Such pen scanners may include a pen with a video camera focused on a desktop or a paper document, a pen having an imbedded gyroscope to facilitate recording pen movements, or a pen having a small video camera focused on the tip of the pen scanner.
Pen scanners, however, have not been used, for example, to scan colored markings such as highlights. Although highlighted marks may be captured by a video camera, conventional systems do not provide for automatically mapping highlighted marks onto an electronic document.
Another disadvantage to these conventional systems is that a user must manually access an electronic version of a document to make additional annotations to the document. It is therefore desirable to have a system for automatically preserving annotations, such as, for example, highlighted marks, that are made to a paper document and provides effective ways of accessing an electronic version of a document and electronically annotating a document automatically.
A method and apparatus for preserving highlighted marks made to a paper document is disclosed. In one embodiment, a method for annotating a paper document comprises annotating a portion of a paper document by highlighting, performing a recognition on text in the highlighted portion of the paper document, accessing an electronic version of the paper document from a memory based on recognition results, matching information in the electronic version, and storing an indication of at least one highlighted mark with the electronic version of the paper document.